Surprisingly, Some Bigots Back (sort of) Black History Month Obsevance

By dlindorff - Posted on 22 February 2011

By Linn Washington, Jr.

Rep. Michele Bachmann and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, two right-wing Republicans eyeing presidential campaigns in 2012, provided a big boost for Black History Month recently with remarks challenging contentions that this recognition of ignored contributions is an irrelevant relic in this post-racial "Age of Obama."

Although conservative dogma considers this annual observance during the month of February an anathema, neither Bachmann nor Barbour face censure for heresy from their ideological confederates.

Far from being a ringing endorsement, the offensive utterances of Bachmann and Barbour highlight the importance of Black History Month founded in the early 20th Century to counter factual inaccuracies about blacks then rampant across America’s racially segregated society.

Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota Congresswoman and Tea Party maven, said America’s Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery--a gross distortion of historic fact easily evident in the life of George Washington, America’s first President and Revolutionary War leader, who was born in the month of February.

Further, Washington spent the waning years of his life diligently working to recapture two favored slaves who had fled his executive mansion, according to the new book The Black History of the White Houseby Clarence Lusane.

Bachmann’s failure to check facts is not inadvertent, said Professor Ewuare Osayande during a recent lecture entitled “Why Black History Month Still Matters” offered at the Camden, NJ campus of Rutgers University.

“Why does a national figure not check her claims? She does, and she doesn’t care about the truth,” Osayande charged, saying Bachmann’s Founding Fathers assertion is the type of “willful falsehood that becomes patriotic truth” in America.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s recent refusal to even question efforts in his state to issue a license plate honoring a Confederate Army general who had served as the first national leader of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan epitomizes a rancid practice in America’s roiling racial caldron: the denial dynamic of not dealing with truths.

The fact that Barbour has repeatedly white-washed historic fact during just the past few months, for example praising the segregation-defending White Citizens Council of his hometown for what he falsely claimed was its support of desegregation, recently elicited criticism from Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.

Robinson scored Barbour’s historically inaccurate accounts as “either a pathology or a plan” to pander for conservative votes...

For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINGTON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent online alternative newspaper, please go to: ThisCantBeHappening!

Has this ol' fool ever told you the story of "Black History Month - Fear and Loathing at PBS"??? . . .

. . . or what does the "Nation of Islam" and "David Duke" have in common???

Sherman, Set the "Way Back Machine" to 1991 . . .

In 1991, The Nation of Islam released a VERY controversial book entitled, "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews".

(clipped headline and article from Wikipedia)
"The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews - The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is a book published in 1991 by the Nation of Islam. The book alleges that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. The book supported that thesis with numerous quotations from scholarly works, many of which were written by Jewish scholars, such as Arnold Wiznitzer and Marc Lee Raphael"

(clipped headline and article from Wikipedia)
"Nation of Islam - The Nation of Islam is a Muslim African-American religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan, by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930. . . The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified the Nation of Islam as a hate group"

Well, if you think our "Special Friends" went ballistic over David Cole's documentary on "Auschwitz" . . .

. . . of Richard Falks U.N. comments on 9-11 Truth . ..

. . . you should have seen the fireworks over this release by "The Nation of Islam".

Damage control was put into overdrive and folks like "historian" Saul S. Friedman quickly put out books screaming "Anti-Semitism" and there was a major media blitz to shout down this "heresy" . . .
. . . and good ol' Steven "Everything In This Film Is True" Spielberg even put out the 1997 film "Amistad" to make sure the "orthodox" Slave Trade story was preserved in the public mind . . . ;-)

This is when it gets interesting . . . and almost surreal . . .

Enter David Duke . . .

(clipped biography from Wikipedia)
"David Duke - David Ernest Duke (born July 1, 1950) is an American white nationalist activist and writer, and former Republican Louisiana State Representative. A former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke describes himself as a racial realist, asserting that 'all people have a basic human right to preserve their own heritage.' He is a strong advocate of opposition to Zionism. . . "

Turns out, that 15 years before "The Secret Relationship" was released, David Duke appeared on the PBS show, "Black Perspectives In The News" (WHYY Philadelphia) to discuss this topic based on the 1968 research of Walter White, Jr.

Apparently word got back to the Anti-Defamation League about the content of the show. Jewish leaders Sol Rosen, Harry Bass, and Peter Minchuck filed a court injunction in the Common Pleas court in Philadelphia asking the judge to block the airing of the PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE show.

The judge, Stanley Greenberg, in a 1st Amendment shredding move that we would see repeated in the 1994 Discovery Channel "Conspiracy of Silence" scandal, ruled that the "Black Perspectives In The News" show could not be aired.

And to my mind, that PBS "Black Perspectives In The News" never saw the light of day. . . ;-)

Here is "Bigot" David Duke telling his side of the story, kidz . . . ;-)

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